Unifiedpost Group expands into France and partners with France’s ECMA to launch new digital accounting platform jefacture.com

Created at the initiative of the chartered accountant profession in France, Expert-Comptable Media Association (ECMA), a French Association governed by the Association Act of 1 July 1901, is responsible for providing digital tools to chartered accountants and is launching jefacture.com in April 2020.

In France, the chartered accountancy profession is represented by almost 20,000 practitioners who support the vast majority of 2,000,000 SMEs in France and in overseas departments and territories.

The agreement will enable Unifiedpost Group to expand into France as it continues to assert its position as the leading cloud platform for document, identity and payment-based services for SMEs: “Our entry into the French market will open up new opportunities for our services to drive digital transformation across European accounting practise,” says Hans Leybaert, general manager of the group. “Our entry into this market will follow a similar trajectory to our launch in Belgium, where we work alongside chartered accountants to develop systems and tools that met their needs, as well as those of their clients. This industry cooperation is exactly what we want to achieve, as it ensures our platforms always meet the aspirations of their users.”

Jefacture.com is not the first national ecosystem of the Unifiedpost Group. In Belgium, Unifiedpost has also developed a platform called BilltoBox for the community of chartered accountants, tax advisors and their clients (Belgium has more than 900,000 SMEs).

In Serbia, Unifiedpost created a B2B electronic invoicing platform at the behest of the government. An identical platform was created in Slovakia at the request of a leading group of accounting firms. The agricultural sector in the Netherlands uses its ecosystem under the name of AGROBOX. Estonia uses the ecosystem of Unifiedpost for all invoices sent to government services (ARVED.EE). The same applies in Latvia and Lithuania.

The French jefacture.com ecosystem is compatible with the Belgian BilltoBox, whereby French invoices are compatible with those of Belgian organisations and vice-versa. Jefacture.com adopts the Factur-X standard for mixed electronic invoices in PDF or XML (the same standard as its German counterpart: ZUGFeRD 2.0). It also represents the first implementation of the European semantic standard EN 16931, published by the European Commission on 16 October 2017.

“This shows that we have the knowledge and capacity to develop compatible accounting ecosystems across Europe,” Mr Leybaert added.

An expectation of professionals

The platform was presented to the profession at the 7^th Congress of the order which brought together some 7000 chartered accountants in Paris. On that occasion, the ECMA was able to gauge the keen interest of the profession. A sizeable majority of chartered accountants signed up for jefacture.com seminars and demonstrations.

Jefacture.com aims to play a leading role in driving the widespread use of electronic invoices by the accounting profession that has been announced by public authorities.

jefacture.com: a one-step stop for all the company’s invoices

jefacture.com retrieves (by e-mail, picking, uploading photo e.g.) the company’s purchase and sale invoices. jefacture.com then carries out OCR processing, supplemented by video coding by an operator, thereby freeing the company or accounting firm employee from this tedious step.

At the end of both legal and business audits, jefacture.com generates these invoices in Factur-X format (PDF + XML data). These invoices and those received natively in Factur-X format are sealed and archived for a minimum of 10 years.

jefacture.com distributes the sales invoices to the company’s clients

APIs will be made available to publishers, allowing jetfacture.com to automatically retrieve sales invoices issued by invoicing software. Once processed, sales invoices are transmitted according to the distribution method required by each client (e-mail, Chorus Pro, desktop publishing, EDI…).

This system also enables the firm to offer its clients invoicing outsourcing.

jefacture.com carries out systematic verifications

These verifications are carried out systematically on entrusted documents to ascertain whether the required information and values are consistent and, more importantly, to verify the existence and provenance of the document’s issuers and recipients, thereby guaranteeing the validity of the invoices and helping to combat invoice fraud.

jefacture.com collects suppliers invoices so that they can be paid

The company may give an e-mail address to its suppliers so that purchase invoices can be sent directly to jefacture.com. They can also be retrieved by picking. The company manager will be able to validate the inclusion of each new document. One or more invoices due or one or more suppliers can be paid simultaneously. This payment can of course be made by a company employee or by the firm’s staff member as part of a complementary assignment to a payment remit now vested with the French chartered accountant by his client pursuant to the PACTE law.

jefacture.com complements the document processing systems used by accounting firms

The firm retrieves sealed purchase and sales invoices in Factur-X format in its Firm solution, either through directory synchronisation or through APIs provided by jefacture.com, and implemented by the firm’s accounting production software.

jefacture.com guides and supports the company in monitoring its payments

By providing this service to its clients, firms can provide access to a dashboard that presents an instant view by due date of all invoices to be collected and paid. This makes it easier to monitor trade receivables and payables.

jefacture.com: a smartphone application for entrepreneurs on the move

jefacture is a real management tool a manager can use to photograph a document during a trip, validate new incoming invoices, search for an invoice or the turnover generated with a supplier over a period or even to consult trade receivables and payables.